Dirty Rotten Feminist

I know I have been writing about my own experiences a lot recently, but I figure this is my fucking blog, so I will do what I want, right?

Last semester, for Feminist Philosophy we read a piece called “Her Rites of Passage.” I can’t for the life of me remember the author, and lo and behold, it was taken off our library course reserves since the new semester began. Anyway, it’s a short piece detailing a woman’s different experiences growing up and the unwanted sexual harassment/assault/advances she went through at different ages. And I wanted to write my own.

**Trigger Warning**

Age 9

I am visiting my dad’s house for the weekend and playing with a slightly older boy  who lives across the street. He invites me to go fishing in a pond nearby. We are using nets in the muddy pond that’s set in a small clearing in the woods. He asks me to kiss him. I refuse. He lunges for me and tries to grab me. I run home. His dad is dating my father’s roommate, Karen, so he follows me in the house. I tell my dad to make him leave. He says he can’t because he’s practically Karen’s step son. The boy stands in my bedroom’s doorway and leers at me.

Age 11

My stepfather makes references to my budding chest on a regular basis, calling them “nubs” and asking me when I am going to actually sprout real breasts. Calls me “nubs” for the next few years.

Age 14

I am a freshman in high school. I sit alone at lunch most of the time because I don’t know anyone in my lunch period. A senior boy and his friend start sitting with me. They seem pretty cool to my young mind, and I invite the company. A few weeks into the semester, they start asking me if I’d like to have sex with them; they will give me money, they say. I just shake my head and ignore them. For the rest of the semester, they call me their prostitute, their whore, their slut. I try to move tables and avoid them, but they follow me. I ask them to stop, but they just laugh. I finally go to an administrator to report their harassment. I am actually taken seriously and the two boys are suspended. All of my friends and classmates, however, snarl at me. “Why can’t you take a joke?” they ask me. “You’re such a bitch!”

Age 15

Have my first “real” boyfriend. He is a junior and we have an Algebra class together. His name was John, and I thought he was amazing. He liked really cool punk music, made me mix CDs, and got along ok with my friends. What more could a girl want? One night we are watching a movie with his family. We are laying on the ground under a blanket. We have never gone farther than kissing. He plunges his hand down my jeans and fumbles for my vagina. I try to pull away and I hiss for him to stop. He doesn’t listen and keeps digging in between my legs.  I elbow him in the balls to make him finally  stop.

Age 16

I work at Chick-fil-a. It is getting about closing time when an older man walks into our empty store. I am working the front counter and he comes straight to my register. He places an order, and then asks me what school I go to. I oblige him the answer with a smile, as we are instructed. He tells me he has a daughter there named Brenda. Do I know her. Unfortunately, I do and I tell him so. He explains that his daughter and her mother are both “little bitches” and he can’t stand them. Then he leans in and asks me if I have ever been with an older man. I’ve never been with anyone, so I just laugh a little in response, unsure what to say. He then says he will wait outside for me to get off work and we can go somewhere and he can “show me a good time.” He leaves the store with his food and sits right by the door for the next hour. I cower in the store with one of my supervisors until he finally leaves.

Age 17

I have done something pretty stupid, but just how stupid I don’t know yet. I have struck up an internet relationship with a boy my age that I met through blogging about my favorite band, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. We have a lot in common, and even though he is in Boston, and I’m in Atlanta, and  we have never met, we strike up a flimsy long-distance relationship. His name is Tyler. We talk on the phone a lot. We instant message even more. We venture into phone-sex, and plan meeting in the near future. Then I meet Dan.  Dan is still in high school, even though I am a freshmen in college, and we hit it off. We have an undeniable attraction. I break things off with Tyler, and start dating Dan full-time. One weekend, when I am visiting Dan, I get a call from Tyler. He tells me he is at UGA, waiting for me outside my dorm. I am in utter disbelief. I don’t know who to tell. My parents would freak out and I would probably be in trouble. So I just go back to my dorm, and there he is, all 6 feet, 4 inches and 230lbs of him. I am a foot shorter and about 100 lbs lighter than him at this point in my life. I feel sorry for him. He tells me he slept in a port-a-potty, a park bench, and on a stranger’s floor for the past few days. He hasn’t eaten anything in a long time. He is just so in love with me, he had to see me just once.  Or so he says. I tell him he can stay on my futon in my dorm room. His flight leaves the next morning, so it’s just one night. We are sitting on said futon, later than night, having a talk. I feel like maybe we could be friends. My roommate is asleep in her loft above us. Next thing I remember, he is holding me down and touching me between my legs. He fingers me for a long time, holding me down even as I shake my head and try to pull away. I cry silently. He tries to climb on top of me, but I beg him to stop. Crying, I squirm away from him and crawl into my own loft. I hear him crying in the futon, sobbing like a child. “You just cheated on Dan,” he tells me. And then he continues weeping. I tell him to “shut the fuck up” and I roll over and go to sleep. A few days later, after Tyler is gone and things feels normal, I have a panic attack/fugue and try to kill myself by laying down in the middle of the road.  I am plagued by panic attacks, depression, fear, and vomiting for the next few months. I start seeing a therapist that summer and have been ever since.

Age 19

It is late one night and I am staying over Dan’s house. We have been having sex for a few months at this point. We are, to my knowledge, very much in love. We fall asleep on the floor while watching TV. I wake up and realize he is having sex with me. While I had been asleep. I ask him to stop. He ignores me and keeps going. I keep saying, over and over, “no, no, please stop Dan, I don’t want to have sex, no.” He finishes and rolls off of me and asks how it was. He sees I am crying and asks what’s wrong. I tell him “I asked you to stop. I said I didn’t want to have sex.” He shrugs and says “I thought you were just playing hard to get.” I get up and start gathering my stuff. “You just raped me,” I conclude, glaring at him. “Oh. Sorry.” And yet I still love him.

Is this normal? Is it normal for girls growing up to go through this sort of shit? Is it okay? These are just the instances I remember, that stick out in my mind because they were so scary at that point in my life. Of course, I am not mentioning all the instances when boys talked about my boobs, or grinded up on me uninvited on the dance floor, or felt me up in the pit at a concert, or called me too ugly, too hot, too fat, too easy, or too tight. Since puberty, I have been repeatedly defined by my sexuality and it hurts. It hurts something awful. I hope my future daughters, nay–any girls, never have to go through this.

Welcome to my favorite double-bind:

“If you were hot, you wouldn’t be bitching about women’s rights.”

“If you have confidence in your looks, you are a hypocrite!!!”

Few things grind my gears more than when a man tries to insult a feminist by calling her ugly (or fat) but when there are actually young, attractive girls fighting for women’s rights, they aren’t “real” feminists.

So which is it boys? Am I an obese, frumpy, hairy dog-faced skank (a) or a ditzy, shallow, air-headed hypocrite? (b)

(a)  OR (b)  ???*

In reality, this insult is nothing short of CONTROL. By trying to tell a woman she is ugly or fat (or a lesbian even) is trying to strip her of her assumed “use” in a patriarch–that use is her sexual worth in the eyes of men. So, if she is indeed fat or ugly or a lesbian, she is officially unfit for men to use, and therefore a worthless person. When men call feminists unattractive (or any qualities that might allude to a lack of an acceptable physical state which qualifications are set forth by the patriarchy: ie. hairy, braless, manly, and so on…) they are trying to strp her of the only power they perceive her to have–sexual. When she is ugly, she is powerless.

In the same vein, by calling a feminist who classifies herself as attractive or dares to have the confidence to love, care for, or even accept her body a hypocrite is trying to beat us at our own “game”. They are using bad argument tactics and attempting to classify women instead of letting us classify ourselves. While it is a different path, it is in the same direction: trying to make women feel powerless.

Really, I think you can be a feminist and still love your lipgloss (which is poppin’ I might add) and your stilettos and your expensive hair products. I love those things, but at the same time, I realize they are a tool by the sexist media to make us spend money. And I think you can be ugly, hairy, fat, or even (gasp!) a lesbian and be a FULL FUCKING PERSON. Our worth is not determined by how sexually useful we are to straight men.

*the answer, my friends, is BOTH!!!! Ha.

(that quote is from a commenter on the Feministing thread.)

This story disgusts me on so many levels.

I will recap. Girl meets boy. Girl and boy have relationship. Girl and boy have sex. Girl and boy break up. Girl attends party where boy is also present, wakes up the next morning with no recollection of the night before with bruises and tears near her anus. Girl gets rape kit–which states there is evidence for anal rape. Girl takes boy to civil court. Judge decides that the girl got the cuts from shaving (even though she denies she shaves there) and the bruises could have been from anything…declares that GIRL pay the boy $150,000.

Did I mention the Boy was the son of state Rep. Burke Day,  the family who owns Days Inn?

So, Daniel Day is part of the good ol’ boys network. Which means he pretty much can get away with rape. Oh yeah, he did.

What is really sickening to me is the fact that Melissa Ross’s complete sexual history was disclosed in court; and apparently, since she has consented to sex with Day (and others) in the past, she has no case, since now her body is considered as accessible as a public restroom.

As a non-virgin who lives in Georgia…this really worries me. If I am raped (again…third time’s a charm, right?) I do not have any case.

This really really REALLY sucks.

Oh, and if you really want your blood pressure to rise, check out the comments on this story.

Sometimes, all you can do is laugh.

Because heaven forbid if you are having relationship problems, you TALK about them.  I kid you not: in this month’s issue there is a spread called “How to Snoop on Your Man (Because Sometimes You May Have To).  It breaks down his space into three levels according to the level of detective work it will take to investigate them: “Nosing Around” (”Use when you’re getting to know your dude…”); “Sleuthing for Secrets” (”Use when you generally trust a guy but want to fill in some blanks…It’s sneaky, but not so bad.”); and “Superspying” (”Use when you seriously suspect a man of lying or cheating…”). The tips range from glancing through his shower and rifling through his medicine cabinet to sniffing his gym clothes and checking his email and PDA. Now don’t get me wrong, I think cheating is really awful no matter who does. But I think if you are having trust issues with your significant other, then the best thing you can do is COMMUNICATE. Snooping through his or her stuff is going to do nothing but make you look crazy and cause some serious issues in the relationship.

Instead of only painting its readers as sex kittens who are too dumb/conniving/frivolous to actually have a mature relationship, it should offer a wider range of ways to be (you know…black or white, fat or thin, interested in more things than just make up and high end clothes and man pleasing sex). Of course, I am not surprised. Cosmo is invested in enforcing traditional gender stereo-types since that is the basis of all their advertising…but would it KILL THEM to write an article about relationships that wasn’t heteronormative and portrayed men as sloppy horn dogs and women as shifty, stupid shrews? It really doesn’t do its readers justice.

Of course it did redeem itself by running a piece on “5 signs a guy is capable of rape.” Of course, the ONE SIGN a man is CAPABLE of rape is having a penis. But actually, the piece was quite good, citing that rape by a non-stranger doesn’t just happen when two semi-consenting adults are too drunk to make choices, but rather it is sometimes committed by a calculating man who (gasp!) knows what he is doing is WRONG. Of course, I am the first to say that rape happens in a number of ways, but this is a step in the right direction…running stories that isn’t just about serial stranger rapists.

Cosmo. Really. It wouldn’t be that hard to diversify your magazine. A lot of women read you, and they are craving something more.

Whitney is America’s Next Top Model’s First FULL FIGURED Winner.

And she is BANGING!

I was making my way through my deserted mom’s house, buck-ass naked so I could weigh myself in the master bathroom. As I passed the mirror, I turned to look at myself and I realized that I LOVE MY FUCKING BODY. I don’t care what the scale says (186 lbs or anyone who is interested) or my jeans tag reads (14). I don’t give a flying fuck. I am happy with my hourglass shape, my huge sloping breasts, my chubby hips. I will not let some stupid magazine, like the issue of seventeen I was reading the other day, make me feel crappy about myself, because while they are promoting Body Peace, they are still splashing their editorials and ads with uniform female models. Anyway, the sum of my worth does not lie in my body parts. I am beautiful, inside and out. And anyone who doesn’t like it can kiss my fat ass. 

This story is pretty upsetting on its own: 53 illegal immigrants essentially kidnapped and held against their will. Sorry, I don’t care if they were trying to enter America illegally. They are still HUMAN and shouldn’t be treated like this.

However, it’s the comments that really made me want to kill someone.

Here is just a taste:

“Make them WALK home, with our Border Patrol kicking them in their arses all the way to the border!…This crap has got to stop. These people are destroying our cities, states and country and threatening our culture and jobs and way of life, etc. What makes them so special that they don’t have to obey our laws, etc.?! They have no right to come here illegally! Mexico’s a ‘new world’ country itself that’s even been a country 100 years longer than the United States. It’s time they got their sheeet together and made something out of their miserable, corrupt country and took care of their own people.”

“GOOD FOR PHOENIX !!!!! ILLEGALS THAT BREAK OUR LAWS HAVE NO RIGHTS!!!!!!!! I agree….No FREE FLIGHTS…..Drop them in the ocean off the lowest point in mexico.
AMERICA IS FIGHTING BACK!!! NO RIGHTS<NO SPECIAL TREATMENTS FOR ILLEGALS!!!! Call AUTHORITIES EVERY TIME YOU SUSPECT AN ILLEGAL, Then, report the person hiring them!!!!  The ILLEGALS are TERRIBLE WORKERS, DO A SLOPPY JOB,And COMMIT CRIMES…LOAD your weapons AMERICA !!!“

“Who the hell are they seeking ransom from???? They’re asking for $2,500 for each person- FROM WHOM???? Please, God, I pray to you that my government in some way doesn’t pay for this…no human rights excuses, no nothing. It’ll be interesting to see the circumstances in which these people are let go. It’ll be interesting to see if someone gets piad, and who cuts the check.”

“Are we PROSECUTING the illegal invaders? Hell no, that would destroy the story’s “human interest” angle. Why, those poor, poor illegal alien invaders were VICTIMS, weren’t they? NO, they’re NOT. They’re CRIMINALS, caught red-handed invading the United States. Brietbart needs to try sticking to the TRUTH in these stories, rather than portraying criminals as victims for the emotional (read “liberal”) appeal.”

(all emphasis mine)

There’s tons more at the story if you feel like hurling up your breakfast.

But really, I digress. My biggest problem with this bullshit is the number of people on this comment board claiming to be good Christians and Americans and whatever. First off–WE ARE ALL IMMIGRANTS! All of our European (re: WHITE) ancestors came to this country at one point too, whether it was for asylum, opportunity,  or just  plain old adventure. But we all came from someplace.

Secondly, last time I checked, Jesus was about caring for others and love and all that jazz. But no, the way American Christian assholes would have it, Jesus would be wrapped in an American flag, bombing abortion clinics, executing homosexuals, clutching a rifle, sitting on a drum of gasoline and pissing on Mexico, the Middle East, and Faggy France. Sorry folks, but Jesus would not want you to have guns. He would not approve of your “god hates fags” signs. He would tell you to give your money to the less needy. And he would tell you to let those illegal immigrants in.
It really worries me that I, an atheist, understand Christian Doctrine more than some of you neo-con, racist, hatred spewing bigots.

Finally, and I am hi-jacking this from my good friend Nicki, who actually posted the original story on Facebook (thanks Nicki!) , but I am first and foremost a HUMAN and secondly an AMERICAN. And I love other humans and respect for human life more than I love this country, or any country. Some arbitrary lines drawn in the sand and a piece of paper that really means very little to the ass-hats in charge really does little to stir my passions. But people, in this country and all over the world, that are suffering and sick and hungry…that upsets me.

I don’t care if you say I hate America. I love other people. And I hate sharing a country–nay, a planet with people who talk and think like those above.

While debating a bit about abortion and the oh-so-smart The Pill Kills campaign with some of my family last night, a few things occur to me that many…well I will just say it…MEN do not understand about reproductive freedom.

1. Adoption is not an alternative to pregnancy and childbirth. It is an alternative to motherhood, yes. But you still have the carry the thing to term and give birth to it. You still have to deal with the costs and physical aspects involved. Also, the adoption system is NOT PERFECT. There are millions of unwanted babies and children being shuffled through the system as we speak. Yes, plenty of infertile couples want babies, blah blah blah. But guess what? Most people who can afford to adopt babies are WHITE and they do not want babies of color. There is very little demand for black and latino infants. And, we have to face the facts, folks, people of color have plenty of unwanted pregnancies too. If we take the right of abortion away, while some of the more privileged classes, namely white, affluent folks, can get off to Europe and buy and expensive, hush-hush abortion, the rest of poor America (both white and people of color) are just shit outta luck. Yes–giving up an unwanted baby for adoption may be the right choice for some women, but it should not be THE ONLY CHOICE.
2. I don’t care how many men say they would never leave their pregnant girlfriend and they would step up and do the right thing, until you are looking down the barrel of the gun, you have NO IDEA what you would do. And, unfortunately, no matter how much lip service men pay to the “stepping up” mantra, the sad sad fact is that men will always have to choice of leaving an unwanted pregnancy. Women will not.
3. Nothing makes me madder than the whole “you should have thought about choice when you had sex.” First of all, SEX IS A HUMAN RIGHT THAT SHOULD BE ENJOYED BY ALL CONSENTING ADULTS. Let’s clear that up right now. Almost everyone has sex. And not only to procreate. Secondly, while I do not think that every time a penis enters a vagina it is rape, I am under no delusions about heterosexual sexual relationships in our society: when you live in a sexist society, as a pattern, men hold the upper-hand when it comes to having sex and women can be very much coerced and wheedled into engaging in sex. So, the whole thing about choice and consequences–the jury is still out on this one.
4. And finally: the same logic that if we make the choice to have sex, and one consequence is a baby that we MUST carry to full term and give birth too–does that same logic apply to STIs and STDs? After all, you made the choice to have sex. Should we deny care and treatment to people who have HIV, syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, or HPV? I mean, by killing the virus or bacteria, we are surely ending the life of that organism.

The point is, I agree that abortion should not be illegal, but unnecessary. Yet we are not at that point yet. And even if we were, I do not want an option completely ruled out. it boils down to this: it’s my goddamned body and I should choose what I do with it. And if you don’t like it, then tough shit.

I know I have been mentioning my troll lately, but after the last post, when I was greeted with yet another slew of copy-and-paste comments from him in my comment moderation queue, it struck me that this whole troll thing is really about male privilege and him trying to assert his dominance over me.

It’s no surprise to my other feminist bloggers that the majority of trolls are male. Yes, there are a couple of female MRAs and anti-feminists thrown into the mix, but really, this is a male phenomenon. And though they will probably assert otherwise, it is obvious that a lot of the trolling-type content comes from the insecurity of losing one’s place of power…and the complete shock of dealing with a female that is daring to speak out against that power.

Even if the troll’s comments are actually coming from a place where he thinks his ideas are not being influenced by fear, his tactics still scream PRIVILEGE.

He has harasses, ignores the content on the site, resorts to name-calling, ridicules the blog’s owner, gets into it with other readers, and refuses to open his mind. He relies on assumptions and stalker-like tactics. He is indignant that we refuse to “hear his voice” either by ignoring him or out-right deleting his comments. And he operates with the attitude that he is right, and all other ideas are WRONG.

How does this relate to privilege–well, the main way is the complete dismissal of ideas outside of the realm of his privileged experience, and he refuses to acknowledge the mere EXISTENCE of other experiences, simply because his white, heterosexual Christian goggles have been on all of his life, and when he views so-called facts and opinions about these other experiences, he either does not know how to or does not want to remove them

Thoughts?

A troll, whose comments I will not be approving, tried to tell me that “MEN are the oppressed class in the great majority of “domestic violence” cases.”

Let that sink in for a moment. Laugh, if it will make you feel at least a bit better that there are people who actually think this out there. I know it did me.

I was not going to address his whole diatribe of hatred, but after a long talk with a good friend of mine last night who works with Project SAFE and is involved with domestic violence cases, oh, every day, I felt that this could not go ignored. I mean, said friend has new horror story every day–a woman set on fire by her ex, a man chasing his girlfriend around with a knife, women dying at the hands of their so-called loved ones.

First off, I would like to know what is meant by “oppression” in this sense. Now, I have understood the word, from which I have had done numerous readings in both race and gender studies contexts, the most helpful being Marilyn Frye’s “Oppression”, to mean the systematic denial of rights of the less-powered class to the powerful class. This would mean along the lines of sex, race, class, religion, etc etc. Dictionary.com (hey! I packed my Webster’s up a while ago and sent it home since I’m moving out!) offers a more broad definition:

So, if we take this definition, how can it be applied to men in domestic violence cases? The troll directed me to an article by Cathy Young about how men are punished unfairly by the court systems in domestic violence cases. Since we live in a sexist society, men cannot be oppressed based on their gender. But they can be treated unfairly or otherwise abused…so I won’t discount that when examining this issue. Now, first of all, to understand this, we have to look at the No Tolerance policy when it comes to domestic violence. Obviously, there is a reason why it has come to this–could it be that in 1998, the same time this article was written, 31% of American women “report[ed] being physically or sexually abused by a husband or boyfriend at some point in their lives”? That probably had something to do with it…yeah. So, to recap, so all the trolls can keep up: yes, some men have been caught up wrongfully in the justice system when it comes to domestic violence, but that is because of an overall trend in domestic violence that needs to be addressed. I will agree with the trolls that this system DOES NOT WORK. But not because a few men fell through the cracks and had to attend a $400 anti-battering class…though that’s not really fair exactly, either…. My main beef with the current handling of domestic violence cases is IT DOES NOT WORK. I guess while they are busy punishing all those “innocent” menz (ya know, I just smacked her around, it wasn’t like I beat he senseless or anything!) they aren’t actually addressing the problem.  I mean, 54% of women killed by a stalker (which is usually an ex-lover) actually had reported their stalkers’ actions to the police and 25% had restraining orders. THAT IS OVER HALF. So, I guess, the police aren’t doing a bang-up job, now, huh?

Next, we have to look more closely at the pattern of marriage and heterosexual relationships to fully understand the implications of domestic abuse. Young’s article mentions a 1996 case involving “…Seattle City Councilman John Manning, who came home one day and was shocked to find his wife loading her things into a truck, was charged with assault for grabbing her shoulders and sitting her down on the tailgate (causing no injuries)….” So while there were no physical injuries, this issue of control really upsets me. He didn’t want her to leave him, so he physically forced her into a seated position. But there were no injuries, so it was ok!!!!

No. It’s not ok. It is not ok to manhandle another human, ESPECIALLY one you are supposed to be in a loving relationship with. But somehow excusing it since there were no injuries is complete bullshit if you ask me. Like I said, we have to look at the whole big picture of romantic relationships between men and women and the power structure within them. And for the trolls: that is not to say EVERY MAN TRIES TO CONTROL HIS LOVER OR A WOMAN NEVER TRIES TO CONTROL HIS. But, from what I hear from my friends and such, this is subtle problem that seems to be more perpetuated by stereotypes about masculinity.

84% of domestic abuse victims are female… Male victims are usually no the victims of Intimacy Terrorism–rather, they fall victim to the kind of situational violence where both parties are involved. (This is still a problem…but it still does not really fall into the “men are oppressed” argument.) Women who are abused, however, are victims of Intimacy Terrorism, where their husband or boyfriend is controlling, abusive both emotionally and physically, and then withholds resources so the woman really has no way to leave. Women and children are the main victims of Intimacy Terrorism, and men are the perpetrators. Again, for the trolls: NOT EVERY MAN IS AN INTIMACY TERRORIST!!! If you want to read more about it, check it out here. And there is even a link for info on abuse against men! Again, it happens, but the trend is mostly against women. And since women are the oppressed gender, we are the ones whose victimization in domestic violence cases is more assuredly caused by culture-wide issues in gender.

Women are five-to-eight times more likely than men to be the victims of domestic abuse.

How can anyone try to argue that men are more oppressed in this situation? Yes, there are problems IN THE JUSTICE SYSTEM which is run predominantly by (gasp!) men. So women are not oppressing men in this case. Rather, the system is flawed. It is failing the women it is meant to protect, it has been punishing the wrong people, and since Americans like to rely on it to solve problems like this, it doesn’t allow for the actual causes of the problems to be addressed–problems in our sex and gender roles, institutional problems with marriage, and the social equality of women.